"When George Washington was rolling around, guns were the ONLY weapon an army had - from muskets up to cannon. It was well within every person's means to get enough weapons for a town to be able to go up against soldiers. Now, there is no hope in HELL that Americans can get enough guns to fight off or make it tricky on the tyrannical overlords. Have you seen what most armies pack these days? They're not muskets, that's for sure..."
Guns arent effective? Tell that to the insurgents in Iraq. They are just a fraction of a percent of the population and they are causing trouble for the most powerful army on Earth. Any idiot trying to subjugate the American people would face a much bigger (smarter) insurgency. Recent history demonstrates it would be VERY effective.
"When Mao said "barrel of a gun" he wasn't talking literally about some paralegal with a beretta, but a metaphor about the people rising up against the government, the institutions, the ruling classes."
Mao was speaking very literally. Peasants arent known for their fancy legalistic metaphors. Those are mainly employed by would-be internet pundits trying to explain away the Bill of Rights.
"Answer me this: If the cops tried to enforce some new draconian law on you, what would you do? How, in your mind, can you think of a course of events that don't end in you having your ass handed to you by someone with bigger guns, and more of them? I really would like to know. You don't have the power to defend and enforce your freedom - the cops have more guns than you. They can also call in the freakin' army. Unless you happen to have your own NORAD-style bunker, you're fucked."
I would use all of my Constitutional rights including freedom speech and voting to oppose it. However, if the police were in fact acting to deny all of those rights, then I will still have one left. To quote the Delcaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Our founders considered it a self evident truth that we have the right to overthrow our government when it violates our God given rights. The right to bear arms is there to ensure we have the MEANS to act upon that truth
"Are you seriously suggesting the left wants to take guns away so they can set up a communist state?? Hahaha! That's genius:) I find it interesting you use Mao to defend your views on guns, yet two paragraphs later, berate communists as evil. Which one is it?:) Maybe, and just maybe, they're worried that the correlation between gun ownership and death in America is more than coincidence. Or maybe you like kids shooting each other, the ridiculous amounts of suicides and armed robberies, the gang violence, armed rampages, etc. I don't know. The rest of the world seems to get along fine without everyone packing:)"
I am seriously suggesting that anyone who feels that private firearms are a threat to our government isnt fit to be in our government. As for Mao, you really need to a logic class. That tyrant's quote was proof that guns are the ultimate guarantor since it is the one truth even they respect. Maybe you would prefer that I whip out crayons and draw you a picture? Or are you going for an Oscar in the "Leading Moron" category? Well, you have my vote!
As for the rest of the world- have you looked at the rest of the world? (Sesame Street does NOT count) Most human being on this planet live squalid existences under the boot of dictatorships that deny even their right to be a alive. And you call that doing fine?! If my choice is that or neighbors with guns, I will buy them ammunition out of my own pocket!
I've always believed, even as a child, that the biggest threat to children are their elders.
I know I for one never appreciated being lied to and manipulated, both of which largely define the relationship between the young and old.
One of the questions we commonly hear asked is what advice we would give to someone younger than us, what do we know now that we wished we'd known growing up.
Well my advice for the children of the world is this: Don't believe what people tell you, especially your parents. Keep your own counsel and take everything with a grain of salt. Just because someone loves you don't mean they won't lie to you, and it most definitely doesn't preclude their being crazy, stupid, ignorant, or some combination of all three.
Evil isn't just a philosophical construct, nor is it a metaphor, it exists.
There is very little that we can do about this other than refuse to do business with Chinese companies, which is nearly impossible unless you want to go live in a mud hut someplace.
When someone lies, they're wrong, and obscuring information is just another form of lying.
Hopefully one day freedom will come to China, but not today.
Actually it is North Korea that the world needs to focus its attention on. The sooner Kim Jong il is removed from power the better. As bad as Saddam was, he's a frelling nobel peace prize winner compared to Kim. A very special place in the fires of hades is even now being prepared for his punk ass.
Are you on drugs? Or are you just pretending to be dense because you believe it somehow proves a point?
Please tell me you know the difference between an abstract concept and an accusation.
Actually I'm quite sure you do, you're just being absurd in an attempt to try and get me to debate a bunch of bullshit.
Just in case you somehow don't understand, I'll sum it up as follows. An accusation is when someone says "He's a murderer!!" When someone makes an untrue accusation, they are bearing false witness against another person. When the person an accusation has been directed against feels he has been harmed in the process, he has legal recourse in the form of a libel or slander suit. Both of which are civil suits. If someone is found guilty of libel or slander, they are made to pay compensation to their victim.
Legislation that criminalizes the expression of particular ideas or opinions on the other hand, is quite different from libel. It is one thing to be made to pay someone money because you called them a murderer or a rapist (assuming of course that you were lying), and quite another to be charged with a crime by the state for saying that Nazism (or anything else) is a wonderful philosophy and that you support it. Accusations, being based upon events that are a matter of record, can be disproven and the person making them penalized for lying. Ideas, on the other hand, are not so easily verified or disproven. Even the most specific and concrete of ideas, such as theories about physical phenomena, are extraordinarily difficult to prove. Only in the realm of mathematics can ideas be proven or disproven with certainty. The most that can be said about most ideas is that they are either popular or unpopular, and penalizing someone for expressing unpopular ideas falls under the defintion of tyranny. The only way of avoiding the threat of tyranny is to ensure that any ideas, no matter how vile, sickening, and especially seditious, are free from censorship. To do otherwise is to chip away at the foundations of the very ideals that make a society just and a nation great.
But then you already understand this, don't you? Or maybe you don't seeing as how you're from Canada where violating the dictates of political correctness will land you in court.
A libel suit is a civil matter, with charges brought forth by the wronged party. It is quite another thing for the state to declare certain ideas verboten and their expression a punishable crime.
A law forbidding the expression of particular ideas, no matter how repugnant, is nothing short of evil.
If a society is to remain a free one for very long, any and all ideas must be free to compete with other ideas in the court of public opinion.
The stifling of ideas, even patently absurd and undeniably evil ones, is part of what led Germany down the dark road of Fascism and genocide in the first place.
Move to the US. Here even the highest tax bracket is less than half of what you're paying in Demnark.
You clearly have a strong grasp of the english language, which is the only real thing that America requires of anyone to be accepted.
I'm shocked at the tax rate you have to pay in Denmark, but not suprised. Socialism is just another form of communism. Communism is a philosophy founded upon the insane belief that because some people are able to rise to greater socio-economic heights than others, that everyone must be forcibly kept at the same level. This is their idea of "equality." In truth it doesn't work, even if it were somehow a good idea, which it isn't. Instead what happens is that those who enforce this "equality" set themselves up so that they are above the system. Party elites in the Soviet Union had special stores where they could buy things, including items from the west that your average Russian would likely never lay eyes on, let alone possess.
Socialism does not try to prevent those with greater ability, effort, or dumb luck, from getting ahead per-se. Instead it simply extorts the fruits of their labor from them and uses it to support those who are more lacking in ability, effort, and dumb luck.
Both systems attempt to homogenize a nation's wealth, which is ultimately destructive. It is far better to work to maximize the opportunity for each person to rise to greater heights. Those who have the ability and inclination will do so. Those who lack these qualities aren't worth a plug nickle anyway. The only danger that exists is the ultimate formation of an plutocracy, which is what the US suffers from to some extent.
Forget about them being in touch with the average American, they aren't even in touch with objective reality!
Besides, these people aren't even liberals. They're mostly socialists with more than a few communists and other such paragons of wisdom and foresight thrown in. They started calling themselves "liberals" back when the word actually meant something good. Since they've run it into the ground they've slowly begun calling themselves "progressives" and other euphemisms. A genuine liberal is what would nowadays be called a libertarian, or at least someone who subscribed to the fundamental ideals of libertarianism. I make that distinction because the libertarian party is addled with some pretty wacked out BS itself, such as denying the very existence of a public good for example. I think that modern libertarianism is a response to modern "liberalism" that in some ways goes to far in the opposite extreme. The fundamental ideals upon which it is based are still sound however.
I think it would be wonderful if the "progressives" and "liberals" among us would emigrate to countries where their ideology has had free reign, like Cuba or Eastern Europe for example. Maybe, just maybe, they would wake up and smell the coffee. Some people need to be hit over the head with 2x4 by reality before they'll recognize it.
Unfortunately almost everyone who read that last paragraph is going to assume that by criticizing "liberalism" I'm silently endorsing "conservativism." The truth is that I've got almost as many problems with the right, particularly the religious right, as I do with the left. They are less offensive by comparison, but only by comparison.
My dream for America is that the "liberals" either wake up, or leave, and that libertarianism rises up as an effective foil against conservativism. In fact I'll even make a small ammount of room for the "liberals" since even a broken clock is right twice a day and it is possible that they might be right about something from time to time.
Mostly I just want a country where common sense and wisdom rule the day, not brain dead ideologies. Since that isn't possible because of the epidemic of stupidity that is part of the human condition, I'll settle for the gridlock that was built into the system by the founding fathers to ensure that those with an agenda get so tied up fighting those with other agendas that their collective ability to cause problems for the rest of us is minimized.
But you know what, despite all the BS that flies nowadays, this is still the best country on the face of the earth and arguably the best that's ever been.
The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the constitution as a defense against tyrany. An armed nation is far more difficult for a tyrant to subjugate than an unarmed one. Guns are, as George Washington put it: "The people's liberty's teeth." Mao was also right when he said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Freedom does not long endure when the power to defend and enforce that freedom is stripped away. Rights become privileges, and freedoms become indulgences.
The left understands this all too well. The far left despises the 2nd amendment because it is one of the strongest protections against their instituting a communist/socialist cleptocracy in America. As long as people are able to defend themselves, the "revolution" will never see the light of day.
Now I'm not assuming that you're one of the far left, but you need to understand the agenda of those you do appear to rub elbows with.
Anything Ted Kennedy doesn't like is either a good thing....or lacks alcohol.
This makes me thing that another good game would be one called "Chappaquiddick." The goal of course is to see how many cocktails you can drink before you're no longer able to escape from a car you've just driven off a bridge. The drunker you are, and the more passengers you manage to drown, the more points you get. Extra points are awarded for running over pedestrians, especially small children and cute furry animals.
Lets be honest, the menu at McDonalds confuses PHBs. Shoelaces are worrysome to them. Learning to use toilet paper was a great achievement in their life. The reason why PHBs have their jobs is because incompetent and semi-competent boobs outnumber the competent by at least 4 to 1. The world is ruled, or at least dominated, as "ruled" implies planned and organized effort, by the clueless.
Today Connectiva, Mandrakesoft, Progeny and Turbolinux announced today that they had reached a consensus and have declared that Linux is indeed an operating system.
In related news the value of 2 has been universally declared to be the whole number value immediately following 1. How this relates to the number 42 has not yet been determined.
At the very least we'd be sure to hear some great war stories about.com's that went.bomb.
www.petfood.com... Why buy your cat food at the grocery store for $6 a bag when you can buy it online for $3 a bag and only pay $6 to have it shipped to you.
www.linuxone.com: Proof that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Would you believe I actually have a beta of their distro that never saw the light of day! I'm going to have to dig that up sometime...put it on my website.
The reason why ignorant (I'm being kind) users are installing crapware in the first place is because they clicked on a pop-up window that led them to the crapware in the first place.
Because pop-ups can be disabled in Mozilla/Firefox, said users never see them and therefore are far less likely to install the crap.
Lets not forget the tradition of there being a new remote exploit discovered for IE every couple of weeks.
I do IT support in an academic environment and I've found that just hiding IE's presence on a system and replacing it with firefox means that I'm far less likely to have to deal with some security issue on that system again in the future.
My steps to securing an XP Box:
0) Optional: Install SP2 if possible/safe
1) Turn on the firewall 2) Set the system to auto-update 3) Install good AV software and set it to auto-update and scan the system each day 4) Get rid of IE 5) Get rid of MSN messenger 6) Cross your fingers 7) Pray
Why do you assume that his critique is an expression of personal dislike for the OS?
There are people in the world who are objective and who form conclusions based upon evidence and experience. I know that when you hang out on slashdot too long it is easy to become convinced that everyone is biased, prejudiced, and an inflexible partisan on one side or the other of one of the various ideological/technological disputes.
The next time you read a critique, don't assume that the person making it has some kind of a personal grudge against the product or its users, or that he or she is unknowledgable about it.
The fact that the original post has been modded down as -1: Troll speaks volumes about the capacity of the OpenBSD community to accept valid criticism.
First of all, you don't get it. There is no vast conspiracy of the powerful against the little man. It is true that the law can and has been abused by those in power to further agendas of their own (DMCA, Union labor laws in some areas), but that doesn't mean that these examples of corruption are indicative of the intent or the state of our laws in general.
Ideally the law is supposed to be reason, free from passion. Sometimes it is. There are laws (whether they be legislative or from case law) that exemplify this ideal. Then there are others that fall far short of it. This is why the fight for what is right never ends.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, whether it be against tyrrany from a king, an aristocracy, or any other group whose power vastly exceeds their numbers.
The root problem is that there are forces of good and evil at work in the world. Evil isn't just an abstract philosophical construct, it exists. One must be ready to confront it wherever it exists, and that is everywhere.
If anyone wants to put the hurt on UCSD, the best people to appeal to are the alumni. This university, like all universities, depends upon the financial contributions of their alumni. A few well written letters send to prominent alumni might do a lot to make the university see the error of its ways.
Here at ASU there was a case a few years ago where a convicted murderer was admitted to the law school. ASU lost an untold ammount of money when alumni stopped supporting it in protest. Obviously this case isn't as heinous as that one, but it is still a case of the university doing something immoral.
I'm deeply cynical when it comes to Apple. Every time it looks like they're going to do something right they find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory seems to be their mode of operation.
Apple has made plans in the past to port their various OS's to the PC, the most recent of which was Rhapsody (which eventually became OS-X). I was given a presentation back in 97 about how Apple was going to release rhapsody on both platforms. I was a little younger and more naive back then and so I actually expected it to happen. Had I understood then what I do now about the company I would have told the presenter not to hold his breath.
If Apple actually made an honest attempt to port he OS to the PC, and by that I mean that they didn't cripple it in some way or do something else to sabotage it, then I'd certainly consider looking at the OS as an alternative to windows for other people. I wouldn't consider it an alternative to Linux for myself unless some serious work was done on it. I'm not going to go into all of the issues I have with it because they are not important.
As it stands right now the only OS that I can honestly recommend to the clueless is Windows. I can't tell them to buy a Mac because they are overpriced and because knowing how to use a Mac isn't the same as knowing how to use Windows, which they will need to be able to do in order to function in 99% of workplaces. I can't tell them to use Linux because they're not going to be able to without a lot of hand-holding from me and because knowing how ot use Linux isn't the same thing as knowing how to use Windows.
As far as the non-clueless go, I don't need to recommend anything to them.
If OS's were cars then Windows would be a Chevy (or a Caddy at best), Linux would be a custom-tweaked musclecar / kit car, and OS-X would be an exotic european luxury car. Which car is best? Well that depends on what you want doesn't it?
This guy reminds me of an uncle of mine whose back yard is full of junk. Just because you CAN find a use for something doesn't mean that you've found a GOOD use for it. There comes a time when you need to toss stuff. Bending over backwards inventing uses for archaic hardware just so you can have an excuse to hold onto it just isn't rational.
I do agree that setting up a late model laptop with a cracked display as a server of some sort does make a lot of sense, asssuming of course you have need for such a server. But installing Win3.1 and wordperfect 6.0 on a 386 that's old enough for a bar mitzva is just plain crazy for anyone who has any means of getting anything better. Toss it!
Human beings are aquisitive. We like to get stuff and keep stuff. Some people don't seem to understand that there comes a point at which holding on to something is a detriment because it eats up resources without providing any genuine return. The resources I'm talking about are things like space, electricity, and the patience of your spouse. It is far, far better to periodically do an inventory and toss out stuff. If you don't have a legitimate use for it and aren't going to have a use for it, then get rid of it. If you can't stand the idea of throwing it into the landfill then take it down to goodwill. Just because its useless to you doesn't mean its useless to everyone. Not only will you have more space for new stuff, but you'll find that your state of mind will improve. Lets face it, having a yard, or a house, or even a room filled up with junk creates a problem. The junk takes up space, gets in the way, and is generally a pain, and yet you don't want to get rid of it for some reason. This creates stress. Get rid of the junk and get rid of the stress.
I used to collect computers. Not anymore. I ditch anything I can't put to good use. The only exception I've made is for my old Apple IIe that I've had since I was 12, and if it ever dies I'm ditching it too. Today I've got 2 PC's and an Ultra-10. Actually make that 3 PC's if you count my HTPC that's in the living room. I'm a lot happier now than I was back in my hoarding and pack-ratting days.
I think the author of this piece needs to throw some crap out. If his wife hasn't left him by now then someone need to tell the vatican because she needs to be cannonized as a saint.
Also, why do you assume that I have some kind of personal grudge or bias against Sun? Are you so far gone that you assume any analysis is a post-hoc rationalization of a pre-existing bias?
I strive to view the world through unclouded eyes. If I claim to have a particular view of things, it is because the evidence warrants that view.
I didn't know that but then again it doesn't really apply to me. I don't need Sun or Redhat to hold my hand. The only thing I need in way of support is updates, security patches, and documentation. Everything else I can figure out on my own. Anything I can't figure out probably isn't possible.
We use Redhat AS here at ASU quite a lot. Because we're an educational institution we almost get it for free. If we didn't we'd just use Fedora anyway. I'm long since over my prediliction for throwing large sums of money at proprietary Unix vendors.
If Sun will make me a good deal on an x86 server with a normal version of Linux on it (aka not their buggy rebranded version of SuSE) then I'll buy it. Otherwise I'm just not interested. Solaris x86 is crippleware compared to Solaris on Sparc and an also-ran at best compared to Linux.
"They're already dead, they're just not broke yet..."
Sun is already dead, or at least their current product line is.
They'll still be able to sell extreme high end servers and mainframes to a relative handful of corporate and government clients, but everything below this level is already all but lost to them.
They're caught in quite a predicament. Their architecture is getting its clock cleaned by competitors and their OS is spartan and obtuse compared to Linux. They don't have an advantage anywhere that triple 9 availability isn't crucial, assuming of course that their stuff really is stable, robust and ages well. I can't say that it does. It may be stable, but lets see you get Veritas 3.4 running on Solaris 8 with ALL of the latest recommended patches. You can't because two of the patches BREAK Veritas and there is no fix other than backing out the patches, which leaves the system vulnerable. Sun's solution? Spend $15 to $25 thousand dollars to upgrade to the latest version of Veritas. That is just for software mind you. My solution? Replace the damned thing with a Linux server running BRU-Pro for $4 thousand that includes new hardware and software.
I work for the college of engineering at Arizona State University where I support Unix systems for the computer science department. The sun systems here are withering on the vine. Every time one is in need of replacement a Linux system is bought to take its place. I expect that within 5 or 6 years sun systems will be all but gone at ASU. Our central IT organization is going through a similar migration.
This isn't because of some edict from on high either. This is happening because every single time, Linux on commodity hardware makes more sense from multiple angles than Solaris on proprietary and extremely expensive hardware. This will not change, if anything it is going to become more and more true as time goes by.
This is why Sun is doomed if they don't find a new product to sell. Stick a fork in them, they're done.
Slashdot Mirror
"When George Washington was rolling around, guns were the ONLY weapon an army had - from muskets up to cannon. It was well within every person's means to get enough weapons for a town to be able to go up against soldiers. Now, there is no hope in HELL that Americans can get enough guns to fight off or make it tricky on the tyrannical overlords. Have you seen what most armies pack these days? They're not muskets, that's for sure..."
:) I find it interesting you use Mao to defend your views on guns, yet two paragraphs later, berate communists as evil. Which one is it? :) Maybe, and just maybe, they're worried that the correlation between gun ownership and death in America is more than coincidence. Or maybe you like kids shooting each other, the ridiculous amounts of suicides and armed robberies, the gang violence, armed rampages, etc. I don't know. The rest of the world seems to get along fine without everyone packing :)"
Guns arent effective? Tell that to the insurgents in Iraq. They are just a fraction of a percent of the population and they are causing trouble for the most powerful army on Earth. Any idiot trying to subjugate the American people would face a much bigger (smarter) insurgency. Recent history demonstrates it would be VERY effective.
"When Mao said "barrel of a gun" he wasn't talking literally about some paralegal with a beretta, but a metaphor about the people rising up against the government, the institutions, the ruling classes."
Mao was speaking very literally. Peasants arent known for their fancy legalistic metaphors. Those are mainly employed by would-be internet pundits trying to explain away the Bill of Rights.
"Answer me this: If the cops tried to enforce some new draconian law on you, what would you do? How, in your mind, can you think of a course of events that don't end in you having your ass handed to you by someone with bigger guns, and more of them? I really would like to know. You don't have the power to defend and enforce your freedom - the cops have more guns than you. They can also call in the freakin' army. Unless you happen to have your own NORAD-style bunker, you're fucked."
I would use all of my Constitutional rights including freedom speech and voting to oppose it. However, if the police were in fact acting to deny all of those rights, then I will still have one left. To quote the Delcaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Our founders considered it a self evident truth that we have the right to overthrow our government when it violates our God given rights. The right to bear arms is there to ensure we have the MEANS to act upon that truth
"Are you seriously suggesting the left wants to take guns away so they can set up a communist state?? Hahaha! That's genius
I am seriously suggesting that anyone who feels that private firearms are a threat to our government isnt fit to be in our government. As for Mao, you really need to a logic class. That tyrant's quote was proof that guns are the ultimate guarantor since it is the one truth even they respect. Maybe you would prefer that I whip out crayons and draw you a picture? Or are you going for an Oscar in the "Leading Moron" category? Well, you have my vote!
As for the rest of the world- have you looked at the rest of the world? (Sesame Street does NOT count) Most human being on this planet live squalid existences under the boot of dictatorships that deny even their right to be a alive. And you call that doing fine?! If my choice is that or neighbors with guns, I will buy them ammunition out of my own pocket!
I've always believed, even as a child, that the biggest threat to children are their elders.
I know I for one never appreciated being lied to and manipulated, both of which largely define the relationship between the young and old.
One of the questions we commonly hear asked is what advice we would give to someone younger than us, what do we know now that we wished we'd known growing up.
Well my advice for the children of the world is this: Don't believe what people tell you, especially your parents. Keep your own counsel and take everything with a grain of salt. Just because someone loves you don't mean they won't lie to you, and it most definitely doesn't preclude their being crazy, stupid, ignorant, or some combination of all three.
Evil isn't just a philosophical construct, nor is it a metaphor, it exists.
There is very little that we can do about this other than refuse to do business with Chinese companies, which is nearly impossible unless you want to go live in a mud hut someplace.
When someone lies, they're wrong, and obscuring information is just another form of lying.
Hopefully one day freedom will come to China, but not today.
Actually it is North Korea that the world needs to focus its attention on. The sooner Kim Jong il is removed from power the better. As bad as Saddam was, he's a frelling nobel peace prize winner compared to Kim. A very special place in the fires of hades is even now being prepared for his punk ass.
Are you on drugs? Or are you just pretending to be dense because you believe it somehow proves a point?
Please tell me you know the difference between an abstract concept and an accusation.
Actually I'm quite sure you do, you're just being absurd in an attempt to try and get me to debate a bunch of bullshit.
Just in case you somehow don't understand, I'll sum it up as follows. An accusation is when someone says "He's a murderer!!" When someone makes an untrue accusation, they are bearing false witness against another person. When the person an accusation has been directed against feels he has been harmed in the process, he has legal recourse in the form of a libel or slander suit. Both of which are civil suits. If someone is found guilty of libel or slander, they are made to pay compensation to their victim.
Legislation that criminalizes the expression of particular ideas or opinions on the other hand, is quite different from libel. It is one thing to be made to pay someone money because you called them a murderer or a rapist (assuming of course that you were lying), and quite another to be charged with a crime by the state for saying that Nazism (or anything else) is a wonderful philosophy and that you support it. Accusations, being based upon events that are a matter of record, can be disproven and the person making them penalized for lying. Ideas, on the other hand, are not so easily verified or disproven. Even the most specific and concrete of ideas, such as theories about physical phenomena, are extraordinarily difficult to prove. Only in the realm of mathematics can ideas be proven or disproven with certainty. The most that can be said about most ideas is that they are either popular or unpopular, and penalizing someone for expressing unpopular ideas falls under the defintion of tyranny. The only way of avoiding the threat of tyranny is to ensure that any ideas, no matter how vile, sickening, and especially seditious, are free from censorship. To do otherwise is to chip away at the foundations of the very ideals that make a society just and a nation great.
But then you already understand this, don't you? Or maybe you don't seeing as how you're from Canada where violating the dictates of political correctness will land you in court.
Lee
A libel suit is a civil matter, with charges brought forth by the wronged party. It is quite another thing for the state to declare certain ideas verboten and their expression a punishable crime.
A law forbidding the expression of particular ideas, no matter how repugnant, is nothing short of evil.
If a society is to remain a free one for very long, any and all ideas must be free to compete with other ideas in the court of public opinion.
The stifling of ideas, even patently absurd and undeniably evil ones, is part of what led Germany down the dark road of Fascism and genocide in the first place.
Lee
Move to the US. Here even the highest tax bracket is less than half of what you're paying in Demnark.
You clearly have a strong grasp of the english language, which is the only real thing that America requires of anyone to be accepted.
I'm shocked at the tax rate you have to pay in Denmark, but not suprised. Socialism is just another form of communism. Communism is a philosophy founded upon the insane belief that because some people are able to rise to greater socio-economic heights than others, that everyone must be forcibly kept at the same level. This is their idea of "equality." In truth it doesn't work, even if it were somehow a good idea, which it isn't. Instead what happens is that those who enforce this "equality" set themselves up so that they are above the system. Party elites in the Soviet Union had special stores where they could buy things, including items from the west that your average Russian would likely never lay eyes on, let alone possess.
Socialism does not try to prevent those with greater ability, effort, or dumb luck, from getting ahead per-se. Instead it simply extorts the fruits of their labor from them and uses it to support those who are more lacking in ability, effort, and dumb luck.
Both systems attempt to homogenize a nation's wealth, which is ultimately destructive. It is far better to work to maximize the opportunity for each person to rise to greater heights. Those who have the ability and inclination will do so. Those who lack these qualities aren't worth a plug nickle anyway. The only danger that exists is the ultimate formation of an plutocracy, which is what the US suffers from to some extent.
Lee
Forget about them being in touch with the average American, they aren't even in touch with objective reality!
Besides, these people aren't even liberals. They're mostly socialists with more than a few communists and other such paragons of wisdom and foresight thrown in. They started calling themselves "liberals" back when the word actually meant something good. Since they've run it into the ground they've slowly begun calling themselves "progressives" and other euphemisms. A genuine liberal is what would nowadays be called a libertarian, or at least someone who subscribed to the fundamental ideals of libertarianism. I make that distinction because the libertarian party is addled with some pretty wacked out BS itself, such as denying the very existence of a public good for example. I think that modern libertarianism is a response to modern "liberalism" that in some ways goes to far in the opposite extreme. The fundamental ideals upon which it is based are still sound however.
I think it would be wonderful if the "progressives" and "liberals" among us would emigrate to countries where their ideology has had free reign, like Cuba or Eastern Europe for example. Maybe, just maybe, they would wake up and smell the coffee. Some people need to be hit over the head with 2x4 by reality before they'll recognize it.
Unfortunately almost everyone who read that last paragraph is going to assume that by criticizing "liberalism" I'm silently endorsing "conservativism." The truth is that I've got almost as many problems with the right, particularly the religious right, as I do with the left. They are less offensive by comparison, but only by comparison.
My dream for America is that the "liberals" either wake up, or leave, and that libertarianism rises up as an effective foil against conservativism. In fact I'll even make a small ammount of room for the "liberals" since even a broken clock is right twice a day and it is possible that they might be right about something from time to time.
Mostly I just want a country where common sense and wisdom rule the day, not brain dead ideologies. Since that isn't possible because of the epidemic of stupidity that is part of the human condition, I'll settle for the gridlock that was built into the system by the founding fathers to ensure that those with an agenda get so tied up fighting those with other agendas that their collective ability to cause problems for the rest of us is minimized.
But you know what, despite all the BS that flies nowadays, this is still the best country on the face of the earth and arguably the best that's ever been.
Lee
That someone is going to apply this to their nether-regions, if they haven't already.
You're (intentionally?) missing the point.
The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the constitution as a defense against tyrany. An armed nation is far more difficult for a tyrant to subjugate than an unarmed one. Guns are, as George Washington put it: "The people's liberty's teeth." Mao was also right when he said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Freedom does not long endure when the power to defend and enforce that freedom is stripped away. Rights become privileges, and freedoms become indulgences.
The left understands this all too well. The far left despises the 2nd amendment because it is one of the strongest protections against their instituting a communist/socialist cleptocracy in America. As long as people are able to defend themselves, the "revolution" will never see the light of day.
Now I'm not assuming that you're one of the far left, but you need to understand the agenda of those you do appear to rub elbows with.
Lee
It's a cliche?
Anything Ted Kennedy doesn't like is either a good thing....or lacks alcohol.
This makes me thing that another good game would be one called "Chappaquiddick." The goal of course is to see how many cocktails you can drink before you're no longer able to escape from a car you've just driven off a bridge. The drunker you are, and the more passengers you manage to drown, the more points you get. Extra points are awarded for running over pedestrians, especially small children and cute furry animals.
Lets be honest, the menu at McDonalds confuses PHBs. Shoelaces are worrysome to them. Learning to use toilet paper was a great achievement in their life. The reason why PHBs have their jobs is because incompetent and semi-competent boobs outnumber the competent by at least 4 to 1. The world is ruled, or at least dominated, as "ruled" implies planned and organized effort, by the clueless.
Today Connectiva, Mandrakesoft, Progeny and Turbolinux announced today that they had reached a consensus and have declared that Linux is indeed an operating system.
In related news the value of 2 has been universally declared to be the whole number value immediately following 1. How this relates to the number 42 has not yet been determined.
Just remember, resentment is the sincerest form of flattery.
I love to imagine people in other parts of the world scowling and brooding over the US. It is better to be feared than loved after all.
Lee
At the very least we'd be sure to hear some great war stories about .com's that went .bomb.
www.petfood.com... Why buy your cat food at the grocery store for $6 a bag when you can buy it online for $3 a bag and only pay $6 to have it shipped to you.
www.linuxone.com: Proof that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Would you believe I actually have a beta of their distro that never saw the light of day! I'm going to have to dig that up sometime...put it on my website.
Lee
The reason why ignorant (I'm being kind) users are installing crapware in the first place is because they clicked on a pop-up window that led them to the crapware in the first place.
Because pop-ups can be disabled in Mozilla/Firefox, said users never see them and therefore are far less likely to install the crap.
Lets not forget the tradition of there being a new remote exploit discovered for IE every couple of weeks.
I do IT support in an academic environment and I've found that just hiding IE's presence on a system and replacing it with firefox means that I'm far less likely to have to deal with some security issue on that system again in the future.
My steps to securing an XP Box:
0) Optional: Install SP2 if possible/safe
1) Turn on the firewall
2) Set the system to auto-update
3) Install good AV software and set it to auto-update and scan the system each day
4) Get rid of IE
5) Get rid of MSN messenger
6) Cross your fingers
7) Pray
Optional:
8) Sacrifice Chicken
Lee
Why do you assume that his critique is an expression of personal dislike for the OS?
There are people in the world who are objective and who form conclusions based upon evidence and experience. I know that when you hang out on slashdot too long it is easy to become convinced that everyone is biased, prejudiced, and an inflexible partisan on one side or the other of one of the various ideological/technological disputes.
The next time you read a critique, don't assume that the person making it has some kind of a personal grudge against the product or its users, or that he or she is unknowledgable about it.
The fact that the original post has been modded down as -1: Troll speaks volumes about the capacity of the OpenBSD community to accept valid criticism.
Not everyone is out to get you, ok?
Lee
Whatever you say comrade.
First of all, you don't get it. There is no vast conspiracy of the powerful against the little man. It is true that the law can and has been abused by those in power to further agendas of their own (DMCA, Union labor laws in some areas), but that doesn't mean that these examples of corruption are indicative of the intent or the state of our laws in general.
Ideally the law is supposed to be reason, free from passion. Sometimes it is. There are laws (whether they be legislative or from case law) that exemplify this ideal. Then there are others that fall far short of it. This is why the fight for what is right never ends.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, whether it be against tyrrany from a king, an aristocracy, or any other group whose power vastly exceeds their numbers.
The root problem is that there are forces of good and evil at work in the world. Evil isn't just an abstract philosophical construct, it exists. One must be ready to confront it wherever it exists, and that is everywhere.
If anyone wants to put the hurt on UCSD, the best people to appeal to are the alumni. This university, like all universities, depends upon the financial contributions of their alumni. A few well written letters send to prominent alumni might do a lot to make the university see the error of its ways.
Here at ASU there was a case a few years ago where a convicted murderer was admitted to the law school. ASU lost an untold ammount of money when alumni stopped supporting it in protest. Obviously this case isn't as heinous as that one, but it is still a case of the university doing something immoral.
Lee
I'm deeply cynical when it comes to Apple. Every time it looks like they're going to do something right they find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory seems to be their mode of operation.
Apple has made plans in the past to port their various OS's to the PC, the most recent of which was Rhapsody (which eventually became OS-X). I was given a presentation back in 97 about how Apple was going to release rhapsody on both platforms. I was a little younger and more naive back then and so I actually expected it to happen. Had I understood then what I do now about the company I would have told the presenter not to hold his breath.
If Apple actually made an honest attempt to port he OS to the PC, and by that I mean that they didn't cripple it in some way or do something else to sabotage it, then I'd certainly consider looking at the OS as an alternative to windows for other people. I wouldn't consider it an alternative to Linux for myself unless some serious work was done on it. I'm not going to go into all of the issues I have with it because they are not important.
As it stands right now the only OS that I can honestly recommend to the clueless is Windows. I can't tell them to buy a Mac because they are overpriced and because knowing how to use a Mac isn't the same as knowing how to use Windows, which they will need to be able to do in order to function in 99% of workplaces. I can't tell them to use Linux because they're not going to be able to without a lot of hand-holding from me and because knowing how ot use Linux isn't the same thing as knowing how to use Windows.
As far as the non-clueless go, I don't need to recommend anything to them.
If OS's were cars then Windows would be a Chevy (or a Caddy at best), Linux would be a custom-tweaked musclecar / kit car, and OS-X would be an exotic european luxury car. Which car is best? Well that depends on what you want doesn't it?
Lee
This guy reminds me of an uncle of mine whose back yard is full of junk. Just because you CAN find a use for something doesn't mean that you've found a GOOD use for it. There comes a time when you need to toss stuff. Bending over backwards inventing uses for archaic hardware just so you can have an excuse to hold onto it just isn't rational.
I do agree that setting up a late model laptop with a cracked display as a server of some sort does make a lot of sense, asssuming of course you have need for such a server. But installing Win3.1 and wordperfect 6.0 on a 386 that's old enough for a bar mitzva is just plain crazy for anyone who has any means of getting anything better. Toss it!
Human beings are aquisitive. We like to get stuff and keep stuff. Some people don't seem to understand that there comes a point at which holding on to something is a detriment because it eats up resources without providing any genuine return. The resources I'm talking about are things like space, electricity, and the patience of your spouse. It is far, far better to periodically do an inventory and toss out stuff. If you don't have a legitimate use for it and aren't going to have a use for it, then get rid of it. If you can't stand the idea of throwing it into the landfill then take it down to goodwill. Just because its useless to you doesn't mean its useless to everyone. Not only will you have more space for new stuff, but you'll find that your state of mind will improve. Lets face it, having a yard, or a house, or even a room filled up with junk creates a problem. The junk takes up space, gets in the way, and is generally a pain, and yet you don't want to get rid of it for some reason. This creates stress. Get rid of the junk and get rid of the stress.
I used to collect computers. Not anymore. I ditch anything I can't put to good use. The only exception I've made is for my old Apple IIe that I've had since I was 12, and if it ever dies I'm ditching it too. Today I've got 2 PC's and an Ultra-10. Actually make that 3 PC's if you count my HTPC that's in the living room. I'm a lot happier now than I was back in my hoarding and pack-ratting days.
I think the author of this piece needs to throw some crap out. If his wife hasn't left him by now then someone need to tell the vatican because she needs to be cannonized as a saint.
Lee
I don't know why you think FreeBSD is in trouble.
Also, why do you assume that I have some kind of personal grudge or bias against Sun? Are you so far gone that you assume any analysis is a post-hoc rationalization of a pre-existing bias?
I strive to view the world through unclouded eyes. If I claim to have a particular view of things, it is because the evidence warrants that view.
Not everyone is a partisan you know.
Gaylord....Sounds like a character class from an alternative lifestyle role playing game.
I didn't know that but then again it doesn't really apply to me. I don't need Sun or Redhat to hold my hand. The only thing I need in way of support is updates, security patches, and documentation. Everything else I can figure out on my own. Anything I can't figure out probably isn't possible.
We use Redhat AS here at ASU quite a lot. Because we're an educational institution we almost get it for free. If we didn't we'd just use Fedora anyway. I'm long since over my prediliction for throwing large sums of money at proprietary Unix vendors.
If Sun will make me a good deal on an x86 server with a normal version of Linux on it (aka not their buggy rebranded version of SuSE) then I'll buy it. Otherwise I'm just not interested. Solaris x86 is crippleware compared to Solaris on Sparc and an also-ran at best compared to Linux.
Lee
"They're already dead, they're just not broke yet..."
Sun is already dead, or at least their current product line is.
They'll still be able to sell extreme high end servers and mainframes to a relative handful of corporate and government clients, but everything below this level is already all but lost to them.
They're caught in quite a predicament. Their architecture is getting its clock cleaned by competitors and their OS is spartan and obtuse compared to Linux. They don't have an advantage anywhere that triple 9 availability isn't crucial, assuming of course that their stuff really is stable, robust and ages well. I can't say that it does. It may be stable, but lets see you get Veritas 3.4 running on Solaris 8 with ALL of the latest recommended patches. You can't because two of the patches BREAK Veritas and there is no fix other than backing out the patches, which leaves the system vulnerable. Sun's solution? Spend $15 to $25 thousand dollars to upgrade to the latest version of Veritas. That is just for software mind you. My solution? Replace the damned thing with a Linux server running BRU-Pro for $4 thousand that includes new hardware and software.
I work for the college of engineering at Arizona State University where I support Unix systems for the computer science department. The sun systems here are withering on the vine. Every time one is in need of replacement a Linux system is bought to take its place. I expect that within 5 or 6 years sun systems will be all but gone at ASU. Our central IT organization is going through a similar migration.
This isn't because of some edict from on high either. This is happening because every single time, Linux on commodity hardware makes more sense from multiple angles than Solaris on proprietary and extremely expensive hardware. This will not change, if anything it is going to become more and more true as time goes by.
This is why Sun is doomed if they don't find a new product to sell. Stick a fork in them, they're done.
Report to the nearest disintegration facility for processing in accordance with WTO resolution 57 subsection C.